PLEASE SHARE THIS IN YOUR NETWORKS, MORE PEOPLE NEED TO SEE IT!

On July 30th, YouTube announced it will no longer support community-contributions of captions/subtitles to YouTube videos. It cites low-usage and abuse of this 5-year-old feature as the primary reasons, and yet acknowledges its need by pointing to 3rd-party, paid solutions instead.

"Low-usage" should not be an argument when speaking of the "disabled", who are always a small minority, but highly reliant on such features. If an accessibility feature is suffering, it is a sign of neglect and that one should invest MORE in solving those problems, NOT to abandon it altogether. Google is a $1,000,000,000,000 company and it is directing its users to a 2-engineer non-profit as an alternative, which has admittedly created a much better captioning experience in many ways, but is non-free and will never beat a properly-funded YouTube-native solution.

Google, you can afford to do better. The disabled community deserves better.

December 14 was the First National Conference on Television for the Hearing Impaired (first time captioned television was demonstrated).

On this day, let's have a moment of "YouTube Silence".
ONE FULL DAY OF NO YouTube.

If YouTube promises to continue support for this feature, we will cancel the boycotts.

Let's show Google what the more "affordable" option really is.